The city was humming gently under me Like an adolescent quaffing deeply from the cup of righteousness
Out of practice with my own world I was looking at how someone else saw it
Longer than I realized Longer than I care to admit
Those goggles left a mark on me Then I stared at my own face
An invitation came with my face To melancholy while Nature
Purred at the edges of my perception And before me lay a broad road
Enjoining me to do of myself and make Of myself according to the American
Tradition. Secretly I felt and knew Things I had not perceived my body
Turning into secrets. In other words I did not notice the mechanism
By which something within me noted My experiences and apprehensions of ‘the truth’
Would not be met with favor if I spoke them Which is not to say one speaks only to find favor
Only that unreciprocated realities have a boring Way of haunting the cells
Pulling them somehow down Like the countenance of Cain
Which fell one day and never rose Again, and the fall of his face
Rhymed with the fall out of Eden Leading to the first ****** and the invention
Of cities, where we now find ourselves Each tower the ghost of a farmer
Who failed to meet the favor of the Lord
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Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Ariana Reines is a poet, a performing artist and a playwright from Salem, Mass. “A Sand Book” won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She runs Invisible College, a study hall for poetry, sacred texts and the arts. This poem is from her next book, “The Rose.”